'Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalyspe'

As a young child I was fortunate enough to have a father who regarded film classification and censorship as merely perhaps a little quaint and irrelevant concerning my cinematic education, particularly so if the film in question was of significant calibre and merit. 

Unafraid as he was of corrupting my impressionable mind, I enjoyed a wonderful schooling in the works of such contemporary masters of film as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola, among others.

I cannot say exactly how old I was when I first watched Apocalypse Now, although I was too young to truly understand it, thematically or conceptually.  I did not appreciate that it was an adaptation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or its influence derived from Herr's Dispatches - nor even the innate connection to (and exploration of) the Vietnam War, of which I knew very little. 

However, I can clearly recall its electrifying, pulsating, primal instincts and urges. It was cinema and film-making at its darkest and most primitive, exploring the most disturbed and frightening realms of the human psyche itself. To watch at a later and more mature age, I immediately recognised it for the visceral and innovative masterpiece it is.

The production itself is one of the most infamous in film-making history - and chronicled superbly in the documentary Heart of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.